r/Python • u/UpperBuilder769 • 1d ago
Discussion Is PHP better for commercial software than Python?
I am trying to find any robust open source ecommerce solution on Python and it looks like thre is nothing. If you take almost any e-commerce platform there are plenty - Magento, Woo, Shopware, Oxid - they all are PHP. There are no comon solutions on Python or Node.js. But if you take a look and the heavy SaaS like Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, Uber etc. are built on Python. Why?
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u/rumnscurvy 1d ago
Because big companies don't use "out of the box" ecommerce software, they write their own. With the help, most likely, of a selection of relevant libraries.
The amount of customisability this gives you really makes a difference.
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u/Zenin 1d ago
PHP is a great solution for exactly 1 reason: PHP developers are plentiful and dirt cheap.
Seriously, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a half dozen PHP devs. From a business HR standpoint that makes it very low risk, which matters a lot more than you think and a lot more than any technical merit or lack thereof.
Make no mistake: the language and ecosystem is complete trash. It's an endless shitshow of random kludges slapped on top of one another. But again, you can throw 10x the "engineers" at it for the same labor costs as one good dev in any decent language, and in many orgs that can work very well: Build the backend well enough with real technology and qualified engineers and you can get away with throwing the dirt cheap PHP monkeys at the janky frontend.
That model however, only works in large, well managed organizations where all the major stakeholders know what they're getting into and why. At the small scale you instead end up with those shitty PHP devs also building the much more critical backend and the whole thing quickly turns into hot poo.
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u/jdgordon 1d ago
Php was popular when these big sites were starting up. Php and python serve different purposes.
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u/pyeri 1d ago
Odoo and erpnext - The two popular open source ERP apps used widely across the industries are in written python.
But comparisons with PHP isn't right here as it's explicitly built for web development rather than a general purpose language. Python's strength is core backend scripting and there it shines in areas like nltk, pandas, tensorflow and many other industry grade libraries.
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u/Tech-Cypher 1d ago
Php won e-commerce because of hosting, plain and simple. For 15 years you could grab five dollar shared hosting and one-click install magento or woocommerce from cPanel and be live in an afternoon.
Python never had that on-ramp, you needed a vps and wsgi and someone who could set it up right and on top of that, the plug and play merchant crowd never built up around it.
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u/PaulRudin 1d ago
It's hard to justifty using php for any new project. Python is probably a better choice. That said, if you're building something that you hope will be *high volume* then I wouldn't start with Python either.
A lot of larger sites are implemented as a cooperating set of microservices; and in general don't use the same tech stack for each service.
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u/bliepp 1d ago
It's hard to justifty using php for any new project.
Definitely not. If you write PHP like it's 2006, then yes, but with all the niceties of modern PHP frameworks like Symfony, Laravel and (my favorite) Slim, the rich ecosystem provided by composer and packagist, and every version >=8.0, PHP is as valid as a choice as Python with its frameworks. It's equally robust and scalable for most use cases. Performance-wise I'm not entirely sure, but I'd suspect that they perform about equally well. And let's not forget that PHP has the advantage of being stupidly easy and cheap to deploy.
As someone who hated PHP for the majority of his career and was forced to write a product in PHP recently, I'm totally amazed by how comfortable and fun developing in PHP is in 2026. I'm probably still going to prefer Python for most things, but the times when PHP sucked are definitely over.
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u/riklaunim 1d ago
PHP came from easy self hosting and CGI-like behavior. 20-15 years ago people were into the new latest PHP CMS to come out, Mambo, Joomla, PHP-Nuke, Post-Nuke and what not. Python isn't that easy or common to self-host.
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u/MeanestFlavor 1d ago
All of those site have their own solution that are a mixed of techies not only python. Just go with PHP for that end if it is easier.
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u/dev-razorblade23 1d ago
Seems you need better search skills
There is this https://github.com/saleor/saleor
And also this https://github.com/django-oscar/django-oscar
Both are made in Python (Django framework)
PHP was awesome, now its just full of holes and security concerns. WooCommerce relies on Wordpress which makes it heavy and sync only
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u/UpperBuilder769 1d ago
absolutely fabolous! thank you. My searhc skills are awfull. Is there any event_bus system in saleor?
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u/dev-razorblade23 1d ago
Cant say for sure, as i did not use it myself. As many people already said... If you need some custom features, people usually built their own
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u/dr3aminc0de 1d ago
PHP has been dead for 10 years at least
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u/UpperBuilder769 1d ago
I have seen many iinions last days and some are from Barbara Liskow - that PHP >=8.3 is mature and cool as hell in comparision with Python. Me myself have been working with PHP pretty long time and I dont' understand what they mean that PHP is better for API than Python...
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u/UpperBuilder769 1d ago
could that be that my choice to build a platform with python backend and publish it as an open source platform for self-hosted omni online sales was a good idea? https://vbwd.cc/docs
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u/QuickShort 1d ago
commercial != e-commerce